COLORADO BEND, TX 2011

You didn’t know that the Colorado River cuts across Texas to empty into the Gulf of Mexico? Well, it does.  And about 200 miles southwest of Dallas/Fort Worth, there is a great spot to camp along the river in Colorado Bend StatePark. The park opened its doors Memorial Day of 1988, after having been a cattle ranch and a cedar farm, making it one of the newer state parks in Texas. It is also one of the more rustic parks in the state. There are no campsites with electricity or a water tap, and there are no real showers, other than a “rinse-off shower” where families line up in the evenings, parents holding up towels as their children squeal and rush through their cold showers.  In Wendel Withrow’s book “The Best in Tent Camping: Texas” (which has served me as an excellent guide, so far), he suggests you “watch for Texas-size red ants and silver dollar-size spiders that seem to like to spin their symmetrical webs between the junipers and directly across the trail. Luckily, it’s easy to go around these scary-looking friends, but don’t forget to check the trail ahead for the far-more dangerous diamondback rattlesnakes as they wait in the shade or come out in the cool of the evening after the hot Texas sun heads toward the horizon”. So, it may not be the best place to be introduced to the great outdoors. In fact, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, either, but it seemed like a good place for us to further our backpacking practice. So on Friday, William and I again left work early to head out for a weekend of camping with Pumba.

CADDO LAKE: EAST TEXAS OCTOBER 2011

I seem to end up spending a lot of my weekends with boy scouts … not by choice, really (although they seem to be a good group of kids), we just seem to have the same hangouts. October is when you get some of your best camping weather in Texas. So, when we headed out that first weekend in October to camp at Caddo Lake State Park in East Texas, I fully expected to find a mobbed campground. Happily, I was mistaken.

William and I left work a little early that Friday to pack up Pumba, the car and the eighteen-foot tandem Ocean Kayak, and drive the three hours to get to the park before headquarters was scheduled to close (five pm). The park is located less than an hour due east of Shreveport, Louisiana, but still in Texas. It is on the banks of Caddo Lake, the largest naturally formed lake in the south, half of which is in Texas and the other half in Louisiana. Named after the Caddo Indians, the lake is now guarded by thousands of cypress trees bearded in Spanish moss (which is actually not Spanish at all, but actually very much a native plant species). It is one of only 22 wetlands recognized by the Ramsar Convention as a “wetland of international significance”. Whether they consider it “significant” because it is home to over twenty animal species of concern and two that are on the Endangered Species list (the black bear and the alligator snapping turtle – we didn’t see either) or because the area contains one of the highest quality old-growth bottomland hardwood forests or because of its unique historical significance (more to come), I don’t know. But from the moment we passed through the gates, the place had me.

YOUNG AFRICA FOUNDATION

This is a quick call out to any readers, asking for your help. When I was in the interior of Mozambique this summer, outside of Beira, I met a couple who run a foundation called Young Africa. They run several schools in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. They have entered the race to win the Vodafone Grahame Maher Award of approximately US$155,000 that they would use to build the Young Africa Agri-Tech school where founder Dorien Beurskens says they will "educate thousands of underprivileged young people to grow more food and reduce their poverty". Please help by voting for Young Africa on https://www.facebook.com/WorldOfDifferenceNL?sk=app_268436083179266
Voting continues through October 21. Just one click!
Thanks, as always!

CAPE COD DOG

“The cure for anything is salt: sweat, tears or the sea.”  

– Isak Dinesen

                I believe this. I feel this. I have felt this for a long time. The past two years living in Texas have been my first ever away from the sea. That has meant a lot of sweat and tears to keep me balanced. That’s why when I visited Cape Cod in September, my trip was really about visiting my salty people and soaking up my salty, sea air. It was about short runs on the beach chasing the sandpipers and listening to the gulls and the osprey. It was about long walks down to the cut fighting my grandmother for that rare piece of blue sea glass or collecting mermaid scales, mussel shells and lucky stones with my Mom and my aunts for our next attempt at a glue-gun art project. I wonder if that is what it is about for Pumba, too.

ILHA DE MOZAMBIQUE 2011

I just realized that in all my writings about Mozambique, I have yet to mention the almighty and ever-present Piti-Piti sauce (I also saw it spelled piri-piri and peri-peri)!  Mozambique is well known throughout Africa and has a growing popularity throughout Great Britain and Europe for its piti-piti sauce.  It is something akin to a hot sauce; a mix of ground up peppers, lemon juice, oil and other secret ingredients, and people put it on everything from chicken to eggs to cheese. Other than piti-piti sauce, what Mozambique is most known for is prawns and beautiful beaches. The southern beaches apparently get quite crowded by locals and South Africans during holidays, but the northern beaches, perhaps because they are more remote or perhaps because of the exorbitant prices of the lodging, are much less peopled. The Quirimbas Archipelago, in particular, has gorgeous, white sand beaches and remote islands. Dad mentioned that while staying in the northern city of Pemba for a business conference, he noticed a steady stream of private jets coming into the city, loaded, presumably, with people who would then be whisked off north by boat or helicopter to the expensive retreats on the Archipelago. Maybe next trip. Maybe next life. For now, we were heading to Nampula, the third-largest city in the country, to jump off from there to Mozambique Island for our last weekend in Africa.

Immediately upon checking in at the Hotel Milenio in downtown Nampula, it was evident that we would be experiencing a very different Mozambique from what we had seen so far. The hotel was new and very modern, with wi-fi in the lobby. Just off the lobby is a small restaurant where we decided to grab some lunch. It is an Indian/Pakistani restaurant, and, judging from the menu and the clientele, we decided it was going to be very authentic and very good food! Apparently the menu had previously been very poorly translated into English, and the owners decided to give it up and just have the menu in Hindi and some of it in Portuguese.  As I mentioned before, I am a ridiculously picky eater, so I at least want to know what it is that I am going to be eating, but every time I asked in Portuguese or English what different items on the menu were, the answer was always the same: “It’s good! You try!”. So, alright, we finally just picked a few things … and it was good! And I was glad I tried! Judging from the food, the outfits on many of the people we saw walking by on the main streets and the cheesy Bollywood films on the hotel TV, this part of the country has a much greater Indian and Pakistani population. It also remains strongly Muslim- there are mosques side by side with old cathedrals, many people work only a half day on Fridays, and it is that much harder to find a drink.

ARE WE THERE YET? Mozambique's Interior 2011

          It was now late June and we were almost a week and a half into our African vacation. Although, we had yet to sleep in past 7:00AM so I don’t know as our trip was actually meeting all the criteria to merit the “vacation” label. That morning we were up early for a drive past the Praça dos Heróis Moçambicanos with its 95-metre-long mural which I believe was painted by Malangatana (but don’t quote me on that one), Mozambique’s most famous painter who actually got his start at the Núcleo de Arte in Maputo. We continued on down the empty, early-morning streets to Maputo’s international airport for our flight up to Beira on LAM (Mozambique Air). The plan was to hit Beira, Gorongosa, Tete, Angonia and back to Beira by land in under a week. Holy mother of a road trip, Batman!
                We started out in Beira, a port city about half-way up Mozambique’s coastline. Although it is the country’s second largest city and busiest port, it has the feel of a tranquil, breezy seaside town. In fact, for those who know Honduras, it is a great deal like Tela, with Toyota pick-ups running the slalom up and down the sand roads that hug the beach, dodging wandering dogs and young fishermen. Beira has that laid-back, salty air that gets you to slow down, breathe, and not take life quite so seriously.

          We were met at the airport by Francisco, who had grown up in Beira and was obviously proud to show it off to someone new. We drove through town, past a mix of boxy concrete businesses on loud city streets, new shopping malls with ATMs and coffee shops, and old colonial wooden homes with wrap-around porches shaded by great trees that had probably been around for the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1880s.  We stopped by our hotel, Jardim das Velas, a charming little Mediterranean-style place right on Makuti beach with filtered drinking water from the taps and mosquito nets in every room (Beira is notorious for malaria). Francisco insisted on taking us to Biques on the waterfront for lunch. Like the train station in Maputo, this area of the Beira beachfront made an appearance in the film “Blood Diamond” when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character and Jennifer Connelly’s happen to meet at a bar. There were no Hollywood celebrities there anymore, but we enjoyed a leisurely lunch watching groups of five or six men and young boys rolling the great wooden dug-outs (about four feet wide and maybe fourteen feet long) down the beach and into the murky water for an afternoon of fishing.

MAPUTO, MOZAMBIQUE 2011

         Crossing the border from South Africa into Mozambique it is easy to feel like you have just stepped through the Stargate into a different world in a different time (sorry, my boyfriend’s a bit of a sci-fi nerd and I end up watching all kinds of stuff on TV).  There are eleven official languages in South Africa, of which English is the one most used in government and business dealings.  Although some of the old tribal languages overlap from one country to the next (like Tsonga, for instance), there is only one official language in Mozambique, Portuguese, which is a second language to pretty much all of its citizens but for a few in the urban centres.  The influence of the British and Afrikaans abruptly halts at the border, yielding to a culture that has emerged in Mozambique as a unique blend of the African, Arab, Portuguese and even a bit of Indian sways. The physical landscape changes too as the orderly banana plantations and tree farms give way to expanses of empty fallow land, semi-arid and scrubby.  There is seemingly nothing and no one until, about two hours southeast of the border, you reach the outer slums of Maputo, capital city of Mozambique, home to over one million people and growing fast.

                Our taxi driver, Micas, brought us the four hours from Nelspruit across the border to Maputo, and dropped us off safe and sound and exhausted at the doorstep to Dad’s apartment near the intersection of Avenida 24 De Julho (not to be confused with 25 de Junho which was when Mozambique declared its independence from Portugal in 1975) and Avenida Julius Nyerere (named after the first president of Tanzania).  Our first challenge was just to get into the apartment. This place was a regular old Fort Knox! We needed one key for the gate from the street into the courtyard, a second key to get through the door of the building into the interior hallways, a third key to get through a gate of inch-thick metal bars that ran from the ceiling to the floor at the top of the four flights of stairs, and a fourth key to get through the door to the apartment itself. Huff puff! Looking out through the metal bars of the two balconies on opposite ends of the apartment , I saw many apartment buildings that looked similar to this one: tall cement buildings four to six stories high, with barred balconies where women hand washed laundry in a sink and hung the bright colors on lines to dry, barred windows through which wafted smells of seafood dinners and sounds of jazz and the more Caribbean-styled marrabenta. Like any city, it is alive with the sounds and smells of thousands of people cramped in together. Unique to this one, though, is the mixture of the old wooden colonial homes with wrap-around porches and detailed wooden or steel ornamentation which often look like they have been transported from a plantation somewhere; the ugly Marxist-styled cinder block high-rises built just after independence; and the more modern shopping centers and hotels that look just like the ones I have seen all over Latin America.

SOUTH AFRICA 2011: JOHANNESBURG & TIMBAVATI

          Sixteen hours, three Dramamine and about four movies later I was ready to be somewhere, anywhere … well, maybe not anywhere, but Johannesburg sounded good (of course, by that time I was probably in desperate need of some of that make-up I had been so quick to leave behind). We were met at the Tambo airport by two lovely Scotsmen, friends of my father’s, who swept us off to a dinner of kudu, springbok and Southafrican wine in Nelson Mandela Square.  Almost immediately we started picking up some terminology that would be important to our trip.  Biltong, for instance, is a jerky very popular in South Africa.  Sundowner (ah, sundowner) is a delightful custom of having a cocktail as one reflects upon the conclusion of the day and the fiery setting sun.  Gautrain is the fast-train that we caught just blocks from our hotel, the Southern Sun, which carried us straight into the Tambo airport the next morning for our flight up to Hoedspruit. Oh, and when at the hotel they tell you to hit blah blah blah “hash” in order to reset the safe in your room, that means the pound sign (an important tidbit if you want to be able to retrieve your passport the next day!).

AFRICA 2011

In 2009 my parents, like so many others, lost a huge chunk of their hard-earned retirement savings when the bubble burst, the stock market crashed, and the shit hit the fan in the US economy. My father was back out on the hunt for a job. My father, unlike so many others, was fortunate enough to find one … albeit in Mozambique, on the opposite side of the world from his family. Still, it afforded him not only an income, but an exciting professional challenge, and an opportunity to return to the continent of his youth. In January of 2011, he said goodbye to his life of napping in hammocks, he said goodbye to his days of reading on the beach, he said goodbye to his family and rejoined the workforce.

                It was not until the middle of June that same year that my older sister, Rory, and I would have the distinct pleasure (sarcasm yet to be unveiled) of being Dad’s first family visitors. The plan was to fly to South Africa (incredibly accessible since the 2010 World Cup had been hosted by this, Mozambique’s lovely, sophisticated, up-and-coming neighbor to the west). Here we would spend a few days on safari in the Timbavati on a private game reserve recommended to us by a friend who, since fleeing Zimbabwe with his family (like so many other white farmers when Mugabe commenced his atrocities) now makes his living in Mozambique doing, among other things, hunting safaris. From Timbavati, we would drive the four hours across the border to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, with Micas, the owner of a taxi company often contracted by my father and others in his office. Upon arrival, Dad would be keeping up his normal work schedule, so Rory and I would pretty much be tagging along, hitching a ride, or, as she so delicately put it, “we’re luggage”.

HOW THE TRAVEL BUG CRAWLED INTO MY EAR

     The Inca have a trail. The Maya have a trail. Heck, doesn’t silk have its own road? Well, here are a few stories about the trail I have followed through life: the Gringa Perdida Trail. I wish I had thought years ago to share it in this way.


     You see, I’ve been traveling and having wild adventures, mostly with my family, for as long as I can remember.  In fact, I recently learned a new term for myself: a third-culture kid (Ok, so at least I was one while I was still a kid). Wikipedia even has a page about it! Basically, it’s when a child grows up in one or more cultures other than the one they are born into and that their parents are from. The amalgamation of the family culture and the culture outside the front door becomes a third, unique culture within that child. It’s not that I like to ascribe labels to myself or anyone else, for that matter, but sometimes it’s a comfort to see something defined that we can point to and identify with.  In any case, how did I become this TCK? My mother was born in Argentina and moved to New England at a young age. My father lived in Nigeria and Ghana while during his childhood until he, too, moved to New England. They met on Virginia Beach when my Dad was training for the UDT (which would later evolve into the US Navy Seals) and my Mom would walk the same beaches with her two dachshunds. The rest is history.